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Pudding Monsters is the first new game from Zentolab since Cut the Rope. Does humanity need another addictive touch-screen app? We all feel like we’ve wasted plenty of time on Angry Birds, Where’s My Water?, Temple Run, Draw Something, etc. It is possible, however, that these games are making the world a better place.

Pudding Monsters is essentially a block sliding puzzler. It has zany sound effects, imaginative animations, and fun music that sounds like it belongs in a screwball vampire comedy (including mildly spooky theremin melodies).

The goal is to get all the little red pudding blobs to come together into a single happy pudding monster. When the pudding congeals atop starred squares, the player gets bonus points: stars splash across the tablet screen, the theremin melodies crescendo, and the pudding-heads start mumbling in pudding language.

As is to be expected from a touch-screen puzzler, each level introduces new mechanics that increase the complexity of game play. These challenges are simultaneously complicated enough to keep you engaged and simple enough to make you feel validated easily and often. You puff out your chest with pride, exalted with that gaming emotion called “fiero,” which literally translates from the Italian as “proud.”

Pudding Monsters is pretty mundane, but strangely addictive. Phone/tablet games like these lack the grandiosity of console games like Halo, or even Epic Mickey. And without time restrictions, they are boring compared to any of the Super Mario platformers, or tower defense games like Plants vs. Zombies.

Still, these games make us obsessive enough that we can’t stop playing. Perhaps because boring games fit boring moments. For adults, these games are time wasters. That is, we play games like these in order to fill time that is otherwise wasted: while the clock ticks in the doctor’s waiting room, while we’re claustrophobically stuck in a coach class airline seat, when the commuter rail is dragging behind schedule.

These games keep us hooked with the promise of a tiny little reward called “fiero.” In game design and gamification, this term comes up often. In Reality is Broken, a popular book that suggests ways to bring the wisdom of the game-world into the real-word, Jane McGonigal writes,

Fiero, according to researchers at the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Science Research at Stanford, is the emotion that first created the desire to leave the cave and conquer the world. It’s a craving for challenges that we can overcome, battles we can win, and dangers we can vanquish.

Scientist have recently documented that fiero is one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience. It involves three different structures of the reward circuitry of the brain, including the mesocorticolimbic center, which is most typically associated with reward and addiction. Fiero is a rush unlike any other rush, and the more challenging the obstacle we overcome, the more intense the fiero.

I know very little about neurology. Still, I’m pretty sure that when researchers get all up in people’s brains they don’t find neuro-receptors with the word “fiero” scribbled on them like tiny calligraphy on a microscopic grain of rice. Instead, the word “fiero” was chosen by researchers to signify a particular neurochemical phenomena. Why that word?

The Italian word “fiero” comes from the same Latin root as our English word “fierce.” This is not only because the particular kind of pride that fiero describes makes us feel like an aggressive alpha predator at the top of the virtual food chain. Fiero also has to do with a feeling of wildness. The Latin root “fiera” is also the origin of the English word “feral,” which means untamed or undomesticated.

The feeling of fiero, then, is less about pride and more about being your untamed self. Fiero is about the way you feel when you are liberated from the chatter of the civilized life world and enabled to just be uninhibited, to play free. We want those little rushes of fiero because, in a way, it is the opposite of feeling self-conscious, of feeling like we need to conform. It neurochemically reminds us that we have the ability to respond in an unrestrained way to the immediate circumstances of the world around us. It’s a cave man thing.

That little rush that we get from transcending each level in a game like Pudding Monsters tricks our brains. We feel like we’ve been momentarily freed from the humdrum of everyday boredom. Is this just neurochemical escapism? Or is it possible that these little games help us feel a necessary reminder that on some level we remain predatory beasts? And by satiating our fierce instincts, do these games enable us to contribute more effectively to society without being enslaved to our ravenous origins?

We’re often warned that gaming and gadgets are turning people away from one another, that screen time inhibits our ability to relate face to face. But these technologies might be doing the opposite. They may be displacing conflict and aggression into a virtual world, opening a space for a kinder, less violent collective experience.